To those of us who had watched our rockets keel over, spin out of control, or blow up, the idea of putting a man on the Moon seemed almost too breathtakingly ambitious.
It was Representative James G. Fulton (R-PA), then an eight-term congressman, who said on the day of Gagarin’s flight, “I’m darned well tired of coming in second-best all the time.” That was the comment a reporter waved at President Kennedy at his press conference and that got Kennedy to say, with world-weariness, “No one is more tired than I am.”2
But that’s the point: Gagarin’s flight on April 12, 1961, wasn’t a new triumph for Russia or a new indignity for the U.S. Every six months, for three and a half years, the story had been the same: a Russian space program that, in so many important and visible ways, was the world’s leading space program.
Kennedy wasn’t that interested in space, but he understood how important space was becoming—strategically and symbolically. Nuclear missiles and long-range bombers were indispensable, but they weren’t persuasive and inspiring and visible the way astronaut heroes were.
The Russians launched the first satellite and the first satellite with living creatures aboard (Sputniks 1 and 2). The Russians flew the first spacecraft to the Moon (Luna 1). The Russians launched the first spacecraft that hit the Moon, including delivering tiny metal Soviet flags to the surface (Luna 2). The Russians launched the first spacecraft to visit the dark side of the Moon, which had never before been seen by humans. It took photos using conventional film; the film was developed onboard the space probe while it was streaking around the Moon, and those negatives were scanned, digitized, and radioed back to Earth—all in 1959 (Luna 3).3 In 1960, the Russians launched the first animals into space who orbited and then landed back on Earth alive and safe—the dogs Strelka and Belka (Sputnik 5)—before Kennedy was elected president.
And then the Russians launched the first astronaut into orbit and brought him home safely and to worldwide acclaim.
The years of frustration were, at last, boiling over. Americans didn’t like being second—which in this case was the same as being last—and were particularly irritated by being told they would catch up eventually, but it would take a while. It had been a while since that first eerie beep-beep-beep, and since Laika, and there was no catching up. In fact the Russians had sent Gagarin into orbit on their first manned flight; the U.S. too was scheduled to put its first astronaut into space, Alan Shepard, but he would go just to the edge of space in a 100-mile-high arc, landing just 300 miles from Cape Canaveral in the Atlantic Ocean, without going into orbit. The U.S. was systematically planning to underperform the Russians, even after the Russians had shown what they could do.
The day after Gagarin’s flight, NASA administrator James Webb and his second-in-command, Hugh Dryden, were called before the Science and Astronautics Committee of the House of Representatives for what was dubbed an “autopsy.” It was conducted in the largest committee hearing room available to the House. But the congressmen weren’t that interested in what Webb and Dryden had to say.
“I want to see this country mobilized to a wartime basis because we are at war,” said Representative Victor Anfuso (D-NY). “I want to see schedules cut in half. I want to see what NASA says it’s going to do in 10 years done in five.
“I want to see some ‘first’ coming out of NASA such as a landing on the Moon.”
The chairman of the House Committee, Overton Brooks (D-LA), insisted, “It’s time we stopped making excuses on why we are behind and have been for three years. . . . The nation that controls space may well control Earth.”
Representative Fulton made Webb an offer: “Tell me how much money you need and this committee will authorize all you need.”4
That Friday night, April 14, 1961, as the regular workday wound down, President Kennedy gathered a group of advisors in the Cabinet Room, just off the Oval Office, to talk through the space problem. The question they confronted wasn’t how to build a rational, step-wise, carefully conceived, and science-driven program. The problem was clear on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and the TV news broadcasts each evening: the Soviet Union kept demonstrating over and over its initiative, its ambition, its technological preeminence, at least in space, at least in space spectaculars. If you were the leader of a nation trying to decide which of the great powers to follow, which of the two systems produced great results, which way was the future, the Russian space program was one way of seeing the future.
Present in the Cabinet Room that Friday evening were seven people in addition to the president: James Webb, who had been head of NASA for 59 days, and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, a scientist deeply experienced in both NASA and rocket technology; Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science advisor and a strong opponent of expensive manned space programs; David Bell, the head of the federal budget office; and Ed Welsh, a longtime space policy advisor. Ted Sorensen, one of Kennedy’s closest aides, was there, after running an hours-long preliminary meeting that afternoon with the same group. The seventh person was Hugh Sidey, the White House correspondent for Time and Life magazines, who had been invited to watch Kennedy hash out the space question, to get a sense of what the response of the New Frontier would be to Gagarin’s flight, for use in a future magazine story.
The group assembled around the cabinet table. Wiesner had his pipe, unlit. Kennedy entered, and the group rose as he took one of the chairs. He pushed it away from the table, then rocked back on the two rear legs and propped his right shoe on the edge of the table.
“As I understand it,” Kennedy said to the group, “the problem goes back to 1948, when we learned how to make smaller [nuclear] warheads that could be carried with smaller boosters.” The U.S. didn’t have the big rockets that were powering the Russian space program because the U.S. didn’t need them to deliver nuclear bombs. “What can we do now?”
The president went around the table looking for recommendations on the possibility of catching up to the Russians. As he listened, Sidey says, he rocked on the two legs of his chair and absentmindedly tapped his front teeth with his fingernails.
The reports were not encouraging; when it came to human spaceflight, the Russians probably still had a two- or three-year lead. Sidey says the president found the conversation frustrating.
“Now let’s look at this,” the president said. “Is there any place where we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go around the Moon before them? Can we put a man on the Moon before them? . . . Can we leapfrog?”
The Cabinet Room discussion was a mirror of the one Sorensen had conducted a few hours earlier, which had concluded there was only one path to beating the Russians.
Now Dryden spoke up. He told Kennedy that putting a man on the Moon was the one way to best the Russians, but that it would require a Manhattan Project–style effort in terms of both cost and intensity. Dryden believed it might cost up to $40 billion, an extraordinary sum at a moment when the entire federal budget was less than $100 billion a year. Even with that kind of effort, Dryden said, the chance of beating the Soviets, the chance of success, was probably only 50 percent.
As Sorensen had imagined at the afternoon meeting, the idea of landing on the Moon captured Kennedy. “The cost, that’s what gets me,” he said. “When we know more, I can decide if it’s worth it or not.” He was clearly talking about the only serious option on the table: an all-out push to the Moon. “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows how.” Kennedy paused. “There’s nothing more important.”
Kennedy let his chair rock back to the floor, rose, thanked the men, then turned and headed for the Oval Office, trailed by Sorensen and Sidey. Sorensen and Kennedy stepped into the Oval Office to confer, while Sidey waited outside.5
Sorensen says Kennedy was nervous about the idea of going to the Moon, but animated. “He immediately sensed that the possibility of putting a man on the Moon could galvanize public support for the exploration of space as one of the great human adventures of the twentieth century.” The president told him to figure out if it was really possible.
Sorensen stepped out of the Oval Office to find Sidey waiting for him. The U.S. response to Gagarin, he told Sidey, “would be strong and dramatic.”
“We’re going to the Moon,” Sorensen said. He was exultant at the idea. He was talking to a reporter, though, and immediately qualified his excitement, telling Sidey that Kennedy wanted the question thoroughly researched in terms of logistics and cost.6
That Friday evening, though, was the moment Kennedy concluded that if the U.S. was going to race the Russians, the only finish line was the Moon itself.
The six weeks from that Friday evening meeting to May 25, and what the White House called Kennedy’s second State of the Union address for 1961, were packed with a series of interlocking and momentous events.
The next morning, Saturday, April 15, the long-planned Cuban exile effort to overthrow Fidel Castro by invading Cuba began with a somewhat hapless attack on Castro’s air force by American B-26 bombers, piloted by Cuban exiles, painted to disguise their origin and flown from Nicaragua.
Early Monday morning, amid worldwide attention to the air attack and accusations that the U.S. was behind it, 1,400 Cuban exiles motored ashore in landing craft at Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. They had been trained in Guatemala for a year by the CIA, and the attack itself had been planned, coordinated, supplied, and executed under the direction of the CIA, an operation approved by President Eisenhower, and then inherited, reviewed, and approved by Kennedy.
Within hours the invasion turned into a debacle, both slapstick and deadly. Two of four freighters loaded with ammunition and supplies for the invaders were sunk by Cuban air force jet fighters, and the other two freighters fled back south to international waters. CIA planners didn’t know enough about the Bay of Pigs to know about its coral reefs that crippled and capsized some small boats taking troops ashore. Radios and weapons were immersed or lost overboard, leaving whole platoons with no weapons and no communications. Although Kennedy staunchly refused to provide support from the U.S. military to the invading exiles—to avoid the U.S. military actually invading Cuba, which might have provoked a direct military response from Russia—any hope that the invasion would be seen as an organic Cuban effort, a rebellion unconnected to the U.S., unraveled as quickly as the invasion itself.
By Wednesday the invading force was so low on ammunition and so desperately outmanned by 20,000 Cuban soldiers who surrounded them—soldiers led by Castro himself—that the invaders surrendered.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was over about 60 hours after it started.7
On the previous Wednesday, the U.S. had been humiliated on the world stage by the triumphant spaceflight of the Russian Yuri Gagarin. One week later the U.S. was humiliated by the hapless collapse of a military effort to overthrow Fidel Castro. In both cases the communist world triumphed, and wasn’t shy about the triumph. The reputation of Khrushchev and Russia was immeasurably enhanced by the first human spaceflight. Castro and his revolution were immeasurably strengthened, both literally and in terms of worldwide reputation, by swiftly defeating invaders backed by the might of the United States.
The failed Bay of Pigs invasion was such a series of compounded errors, and such an international embarrassment, that amid all the postinvasion statements, press conferences, and consultations, Kennedy decided to quietly meet with his predecessor at Camp David on the Saturday after the invasion failed. At Camp David, Eisenhower, out of office just three months, urged unity behind Kennedy and then confided, “It is nice to be in a position where you are not expected or really even allowed to say anything.”8
The hurried space program review that Kennedy had ordered just the previous Friday night had managed to gather some momentum during the week of the Bay of Pigs, despite the disaster.
Kennedy met with NASA chief James Webb and Vice President Johnson on Wednesday afternoon, April 19, just as the Cuban exiles were getting ready to surrender. Johnson had played a key role in the Senate in the wake of Sputnik, convening hearings on the space program, and now he was head of a group Kennedy had revived called the National Aeronautics and Space Council. Kennedy asked Johnson to take the lead on figuring out what the U.S. should do in space, and to figure it out quickly—a role Johnson clearly relished.
The next day Kennedy sent Johnson a memo that has become famous as a kind of foundation stone of the U.S. race to the Moon. It was drafted by Sorensen but has the conversationally inquisitorial tone of Kennedy’s voice. The whole note—it’s more a note than a memo, although the main points are numbered—is 12 sentences long, and nine of them are questions, direct, challenging:
1. Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?
2. How much additional would it cost?
3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs. If not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up.
4. In building large boosters should we put [our] emphasis on nuclear, chemical or liquid fuel, or a combination of these three?
5. Are we making maximum effort? Are we achieving necessary results?
The note ends, “I would appreciate a report on this at the earliest possible moment.”
These were the vice president’s marching orders:
Can we beat the Russians?
Is going to the Moon the way to do it?
Is there any other way to win?
Are we running the race with maximum intensity—a question Kennedy asks twice in five bullet points.
And by the way, could you please hurry up, Mr. Vice President, and get these questions answered—including what will this all cost?
That note became the foundation of the Apollo program, and it’s important to pause and notice that it’s really about just one thing: how to beat the Russians in space. And perhaps it’s about the reverse as well: how to use space to beat the Russians on the global stage.
It’s an internal memo, briskly summarizing a conversation that lasted an hour. It’s a way for Kennedy to give Johnson clarity and focus on what he wanted from Johnson’s review in the next several weeks. But it’s not a memo about space science or technology development, about the challenge and adventure of exploration. It’s a memo about the role of space in the Cold War.9
The next day, Friday, April 21, Kennedy held another press conference, although his most recent one had been just the previous Wednesday. It was the end of the worst week of Kennedy’s young presidency. The failed invasion had only aggravated Cold War tensions around the world, Khrushchev vowing to provide “all necessary assistance in beating back the armed attack on Cuba,” with well-organized anti-American protests in Moscow and Warsaw, Cairo and Mexico City. On Thursday, Kennedy had given a speech about the Cuba invasion to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, declaring that “Cuba must not be abandoned to the Communists” and that “the forces of communism are not to be underestimated in Cuba or anywhere else in the world.”10
Kennedy opened the Friday morning press conference by saying he wouldn’t take questions on Cuba, preferring to let his speech to the newspaper editors “suffice for the present.” But that morning he got the sharpest questions he’d ever faced about space, five questions out of twenty-six.
A reporter asked, “Mr. President, you don’t seem to be pushing the space program nearly as energetically now as you suggested during the campaign that you thought it should be pushed. In view of the feeling of many people in this country that we must do everything we can to catch up with the Russians as soon as possible, do you anticipate applying any sort of crash program?”
Kennedy immediately plunged into a list of his increased funding of various rocket booster projects and stated that everything was being studied: “I don’t want to start spending the kind of money that I am talking about without making a determination based on careful scientific judgments as to whether a real success can be achieved or whether, because we are so far behind now in this particular race, we are going to be second in this decade.”
At another point a reporter asked, “Isn’t it your responsibility to apply the vigorous leadership to spark up this program?”
That was just what Kennedy had been trying to do in the past week, but he again said only that ways of beating the Russians were being studied.
The key moment was a question from William McGaffin of the Chicago Daily News:
McGaffin: Mr. President, don’t you agree that we should try to get to the Moon before the Russians, if we can?
President Kennedy: If we can get to the Moon before the Russians, we should.
Kennedy had never said anything like that before. At his press conference on the previous Wednesday, the day of Gagarin’s flight, he had reminded the press what he had said before: “The news will be worse before it is better.” The meetings, conversations, and events of the previous 10 days were changing his thinking, his tone, and also his willingness to start talking publicly about “beating the Russians” in space.
That line—“If we can get to the Moon before the Russians, we should”—was the news out of the press conference. In a week of incredible events piled up one after another, beating the Russians to the Moon made headlines across the country.11
Vice President Johnson, meanwhile, plunged into the task of answering Kennedy’s list of questions with LBJ-style gusto. He started conducting meetings on Saturday; that first one included Webb, Dryden, and the legendary rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, up from the rocket development center in Huntsville, Alabama. On Saturday afternoon Johnson met with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. On Monday he convened what he called a “hearing” in his office, to try to sort through everything he’d heard and walk through Kennedy’s five questions once more. He assembled a dozen or so people, including Webb and Dryden and von Braun; Wiesner, Kennedy’s very skeptical science advisor; senior officials from Defense and the budget office; and Ed Welsh, executive director of the National Space Council. Johnson also invited three outsiders to provide perspective: George Brown, of the huge Texas construction firm Brown and Root; Donald Cook, vice president of the electric utility American Electric Power; and Frank Stanton, CEO of the TV network CBS.
There were some presentations. There was discussion of where the U.S. could—possibly—leap ahead of the Russians. Dryden had told Johnson that it was possible the U.S. could circumnavigate the Moon before the Russians, robotically return a sample of Moon soil to the Earth, or land astronauts and return them. All were so far beyond the capacities of either nation that the Russians’ head start didn’t amount to much. Von Braun said the same.
Wiesner recalls how the meeting wrapped up: “Johnson went around the room saying, ‘We’ve got a terribly important decision to make: Shall we put a man on the moon?’ And everybody said yes. And he said, ‘thank you’ and reported to the President that the panel said we should put a man on the Moon.”
Welsh, the staff person for the National Space Council, which Johnson chaired, says Johnson “listened a great deal in the first few of the meetings, finding out what Dryden believed could be done and what Von Braun . . . and others . . . thought could be done.” But as the meetings continued, Johnson became more confident in the course to take, says Welsh, and when anyone in the meeting “seemed to be a little hesitant [Johnson] would go around the room, and he would point to that individual and say, ‘Now, would you rather have us be a second-rate nation or should we spend a little money?’ ”12
Webb was, quietly, a little more deliberate than the vice president and a little surprised at his approach. “He just picked up the phone and called everybody that he thought was tops, independently,” said Webb. Johnson looped in von Braun, who worked for Webb, without asking Webb first. He looped in several senior Defense officials without consulting McNamara first.
Webb was a deeply experienced manager, both inside and outside government; he’d help run Sperry, a key aerospace technology company, during World War II when it grew from 800 to 33,000 employees; he’d been President Truman’s director of the federal budget, and then assistant secretary of state, helping Dean Acheson reorganize the State Department. Webb grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, and during the early years of his childhood, his family relied on a horse and buggy to take them over the dirt roads of Granville County. He’d been a Marine Corps pilot during the Depression. He had seen exactly what the U.S. could do—organizationally, industrially, militarily—during World War II.
“I’m a relatively cautious person. I think when you decide you’re going to do something and put the prestige of the United States government behind it, you’d better doggone well be able to do it.” Webb wasn’t going to challenge the vice president head-on, but he did want to be able to deliver what Johnson, and then Kennedy, promised. On the day of the “hearing” Johnson conducted, when he polled the men in the room, Webb had been head of NASA for only 69 days.13
On Friday, April 28, 1961, just a week after getting Kennedy’s 12-sentence memo, Johnson delivered a five-page reply, summarizing his week of research and meetings, and then answering the president’s questions directly. Manned exploration of the Moon, he wrote, “is not only an achievement of great propaganda value, but it is essential as an objective whether or not we are first.” During Johnson’s week of meetings, landing on the Moon had become “essential” to national policy.
Johnson went on to warn that urgency was also essential, because soon the lead would swing so far to the Russians, both technologically and in the minds of people and leaders around the world, “that we will not be able to catch up, let alone assume leadership.”
The last sentence of Johnson’s memo is this: “We are neither making maximum effort nor achieving results necessary if this country is to reach a position of leadership.”14
Johnson’s reply—he considered it preliminary, with many details still to be filled in—went to the president on a Friday. That was two Fridays after Kennedy’s Cabinet Room meeting where he wondered if the White House janitor knew what to do in response to Gagarin’s flight. It was 10 days after the unraveling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and a week after the press conference where Kennedy said, “If we can get to the Moon before the Russians, we should.”
On that same Friday, April 28, 1961, on Launchpad 5 at Cape Canaveral, the rocket that would take America’s first astronaut into space was receiving final inspections and preparations. The launch of the first Mercury mission—the pop-fly-style flight, up to the edge of space and back down in a long arc—was scheduled for four days hence, Tuesday, May 2.
The previous three weeks had upped the stakes. A successful flight, even though it would just touch the edge of space and not orbit the Earth as Gagarin had, could shake loose the sense of stagnation and inadequacy in the U.S. It would give Americans something to cheer about. Given the conversations of the previous two weeks, the stakes for NASA and for James Webb couldn’t have been higher. Success would be a demonstration for the new space agency of competence, predictability, reliability.
A failure would be bad in so many ways, it was discouraging to even think them through. It would be disastrous for the U.S. to seriously injure, or even kill, the first person it tried to launch into space. It would be a worldwide mortification that would make the satellite launch failures look simply pathetic in retrospect.
Any kind of failure, even one in which the astronaut was rescued unhurt, would make it hard for President Kennedy to call for a crash national effort to put astronauts on the Moon, if NASA couldn’t even get one 60 miles up to the edge of space and back safely.
The launch of Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mercury capsule was a perfect mirror of the December 6, 1957, launch of the tiny Vanguard satellite that plopped out onto the beach at Cape Canaveral, beeping away. And Shepard’s flight, although a little later than Gagarin’s and a little less of an achievement, would also be done in public for the world to see.
In a moment that certainly has no equivalent, President Kennedy personally made the decision to launch Freedom 7. At a meeting in the Oval Office on Saturday, April 29, 1961, a group of Kennedy aides—including Sorensen, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Wiesner, and Welsh—talked through the pros and cons of the pop-fly flight. According to John Logsdon’s account in John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, the sentiment in the room was against the launch as scheduled.
“There was a hesitancy there,” Welsh remembered. “One of his staff people raised the question about whether it should be postponed [because of fears] of another disaster.”
Kennedy had been assured by Webb and, perhaps more important, by Webb’s deputy Dryden, who knew NASA’s capabilities, that NASA would launch only if everything was ready. Pressure from the schedule, from the assembled hundreds of reporters, from global politics, would not move the countdown clock one tick toward zero if the Redstone rocket and capsule weren’t ready to go. In the end, a single question seemed to give Kennedy his resolve. Welsh asked, “Why should we postpone a success?”15
Weather did postpone the launch, from Tuesday to Thursday, then to Friday, May 5, at 7 a.m.
Navy Commander Alan Shepard, 37 years old, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, was woken at 1:10 a.m. for a breakfast of scrambled eggs and filet mignon wrapped in bacon. With him was his fellow astronaut and backup flyer, John Glenn. Shepard got yet one more physical exam—which quite likely lasted longer than the flight itself would—and then shrugged into his spacesuit. The Mercury suits had a silvery exterior. At 5:15 a.m., Shepard, carrying his portable air-conditioning unit, stepped into the small gantry elevator, and at 5:20 a.m. he was helped into the Mercury capsule, its interior as tight as the cockpit of a jet fighter.
Among the indignities Shepard was subjected to, and which was duly reported, his full array of body sensors included a rectal thermometer that made the ride to space with him, in place.16
The first manned spaceflight offered watchers what became a hallmark of U.S. spaceflights for the next 50 years: delays. Countdown holds. There was a hold because clouds made photographic conditions poor. An electrical component in the booster needed to be replaced. An IBM computer wasn’t working right, and it and its fellow computers had to be completely recycled.
Finally, at 10:17 a.m., the countdown resumed and headed for ignition at 10:34 a.m.17
The launch and the mission were broadcast live on radio and TV, and the whole nation watched and held its breath. At the White House, President Kennedy was conducting a National Security Council meeting about policy toward Castro’s Cuba, which was interrupted so the members of the NSC could pile out and watch the launch on a black-and-white TV perched on a table behind the desk of Kennedy’s longtime secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. Lined up in a semicircle around her desk were the chief of staff of the navy; Vice President Johnson; Attorney General Bobby Kennedy; Abraham Ribicoff, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze; and the speechwriters Richard Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger. A series of White House photos shows the group watching, all with intensity and seriousness. The president stands at one end of the semicircle, hands in his pockets, eyes on the screen. Jacqueline Kennedy is to her husband’s left, wearing a suit and a pillbox hat. There’s only one picture in which Kennedy has broken into a smile.18
The flight was narrated nonstop on CBS by Walter Cronkite, but more important, by NASA’s public affairs chief John Powers, who repeated, almost verbatim, everything Shepard said, about one second after he said it.
For the first time in history, anyone in the country, and in much of the world, who wanted to could follow the flight of a human being into space from the moment of launch to the moment of splashdown. Just five people watched Frank and Orville Wright make the first airplane flight. The U.S. and the world learned of Lindbergh’s safe crossing of the Atlantic to Paris only by telegraph, and then by radio and newsreel. For Freedom 7, NASA had credentialed 350 reporters.19
The first manned U.S. launch was a particularly pointed contrast to the Russians’, whose space achievements were announced hours after the fact, with no detail, no film, no voices, just statements of official excitement. Soviet failures never happened, as far as the world was concerned, because no one outside the Russian program itself ever knew about them.
The BBC broadcast NBC’s audio coverage of Shepard’s flight live to Great Britain. Japanese radio and TV covered it live. The U.S. government’s Voice of America broadcast live updates around the world—in 35 languages—including to the Eastern European Iron Curtain countries. In New York City the mayor’s office broadcast the radio feed over loudspeakers to a crowd of hundreds gathered in City Hall Park.20
It was a suspenseful and flawless 15 minutes.
The rocket launched. Shepard provided his own play-by-play.
“Roger, lift off and the clock is started,” he said, starting his onboard elapsed-time clock. Then, with a test-pilot’s instincts, he gave his call sign and started providing data, reviewing the status of his onboard systems. “This is Freedom 7. The fuel is go, 1.2 G, cabin at 14 p.s.i., oxygen is go.”
Shepard didn’t stop talking for the whole 15 minutes, but he offered only a couple sentences of observation, four minutes into the flight, looking out a submarine-style periscope: “What a beautiful view. Cloud cover over Florida. . . . Can see Okeechobee, identified Andrus Island, identified the reefs.”
The flight was so short that except for that one line—“What a beautiful view”—and a brief mention that the flight was “a lot smoother now” as his rocket rose, Shepard didn’t convey any sense of his experience at all. He simply radioed the status of indicator lights, equipment, and altitude.
Freedom 7 traced an arc through the sky off Florida. At the very top of the curve, Shepard was 116.5 miles high.
Before you knew it, he was floating back to Earth. Exclaimed Walter Cronkite, “The parachute is open and the spaceflight is a success!”21
To ensure Shepard’s safe retrieval NASA had stationed six U.S. Navy destroyers in a kind of necklace in the Atlantic from Cape Canaveral to the splashdown point, 300 miles east. In the end, Shepard landed close enough to the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain that the 1,200 crew members cheering on deck could see the splash as he hit the water.
A Marine Corps helicopter hovering just a few hundred feet away hooked the capsule. Shepard popped his hatch and was winched aboard the chopper, which wheeled off to the deck of the Lake Champlain. On the brief flight Shepard told the marine pilots, “Boy, what a ride!”
An hour later, Shepard was summoned from his debriefing in the admiral’s cabin to the bridge for a call from President Kennedy.22
The nation reveled in the event. The flight, reported the New York Times on its front page, “roused the country . . . to one of its highest peaks of exultation since the end of World War II.” On an ABC News special report that evening, anchor Bill Shadell said, “The country’s faltering prestige received a strong booster shot.”
The evening of the launch, TV viewers could hear Shepard’s own voice from space. The openness, which would become a hallmark of NASA launches through the sixties and beyond, was an obvious risk. But the rewards from unqualified success were, in some ways, as great as those Russia reaped for going first, 23 days earlier. Not much happened during that 15 minutes—which was the best possible outcome—but it felt like NASA was determined to release every detail it had.
The newspapers, starting with the afternoon papers printed five or six hours after splashdown, published transcripts of the radio exchanges between Shepard and ground control. There were diagrams of the capsule and the flight path, photographs of Shepard eating, having his cardiac sensors attached, riding the elevator to the capsule, bounding from the helicopter to the deck of the Lake Champlain. During NBC’s evening special report, correspondent Frank McGee reported that Shepard’s pulse had been 105 during reentry. “It was a great privilege to be allowed to participate in Shepard’s flight,” said Leonard J. Carter of the British Interplanetary Society. “I was pretty well up there in the capsule with him.”23
America’s first manned spaceflight gave people a taste of triumph and a vicarious sense of what real space travel would be like. It also provided a burst of anticipation and ambition about the future. Louise Shepard, the commander’s wife, speaking from the front lawn of their home in Virginia Beach, told reporters, “This is just a baby step, I guess, compared to what we will see.”24
Jerome Wiesner, the MIT professor who became Kennedy’s science advisor at age 45, and went on to be president of MIT, had run a group that looked at U.S. space policy for Kennedy during the transition. The resulting Wiesner Report was bluntly skeptical of America’s manned space effort and of any “race” in space, a reminder that even inside the White House there was doubt about the Moon race. Wiesner thought manned spaceflight in general, and a leap to the Moon in particular, were poor science, even bad science, and a waste of money that could be more smartly used on robotic probes.
“By having placed highest national priority on the Mercury program,” the Wiesner Report said, “we have strengthened the popular belief that man in space is the most important aim of our non-military space effort.” But the publicity and focus on manned spaceflight “exaggerates the value of that aspect of space activity.” The U.S. “should stop advertising Mercury as our major objective in space” and should “diminish the significance of this program to its proper proportion before the public.”
Forget going to the Moon: the Wiesner Report said that even “a crash program aimed at placing a man into an orbit at the earliest possible time cannot be justified solely on scientific or technical grounds” and might even hinder a smartly thought-through manned space program “by diverting manpower, vehicles and funds.”25
Wiesner was in many of the meetings to discuss how to respond to Gagarin, and his skepticism did not waver. It’s worth saying that within the terms that Wiesner and his committee framed questions about space, they were probably right: in purely scientific and technical terms, if you were designing a space program without regard to public support or public understanding of space, without regard to the politics of funding by Congress or international politics, you would design a different space program than the one either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. ended up pursuing.
But that’s also a silly, perhaps even an irresponsible argument for a scientist working at the highest level of public policy. If not for politics and public support, of course, antipoverty programs would be designed differently, and so would funding for mass-transit systems, and research into disease and medicine, and the priorities for weapons purchases by the Defense Department. Columbus’s voyage to America involved politics and national aspirations; Lewis and Clark’s journey from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean involved politics and national aspirations; and so too did the earliest space efforts.
Wiesner, to his credit, had a firm grasp on the political reality, even if he didn’t like it. “Kennedy found himself confronted with three choices,” he said. “Quit, stay second, or do something dramatic.” Quitting wasn’t practical. Continuing to come in second, as Wiesner put it, “was even worse.”
Wiesner told of a moment that captures well how Kennedy was wrestling with the decision, and with its impact well beyond space. On the Wednesday before Shepard’s flight, the president and first lady hosted the first state dinner of the Kennedy administration, for Habib Bourguiba, the president of Tunisia.
Wiesner was off to one side, talking to Bourguiba, when President Kennedy wandered up. As Wiesner recounts the story, Kennedy said to Bourguiba, “You know, we’re having a terrible argument in the White House about whether we should put a man on the Moon. Jerry here is against it. If I told you you’d get an extra billion dollars a year in foreign aid if I didn’t do it, what would be your advice?” Bourguiba thought for a long moment. Then he told the president, “I wish I could tell you to put it in foreign aid, but I cannot.”26
Kennedy had yet another press conference, on May 5, 1961, a few hours after talking directly to Shepard aboard the aircraft carrier. That call, similar to the one Gagarin had had with Khrushchev after his flight except that there was no gloating and no politics, had apparently not been thought of in advance. It was spontaneous, and with the technology of 1961, it turned out to be challenging to patch a telephone in the Oval Office through to the bridge of a U.S. Navy ship at sea. It ended up being a minute-long exchange of congratulations and thank-yous.27
At the press conference—his third in 23 days, each one making space news—it was clear Kennedy’s push to go to the Moon was on his mind, and he seemed almost at pains not to brim with enthusiasm for Shepard’s accomplishment.
Would the president expand on his personal reaction to Shepard’s historic first U.S. flight into space? “As an American,” Kennedy replied, “I am of course proud of the effort that a great many scientists and engineers and technicians have made, of all of the astronauts, and of course particularly of Commander Shepard and his family.”
Then, without missing a beat, Kennedy added, “We have a long way to go in the field of space. We are behind. But we are working hard, and we are going to increase our effort.”28
The speech that launched the United States to the Moon almost didn’t happen. Kennedy’s address to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, was unusual. Presidents didn’t typically travel to Capitol Hill and address both houses of Congress except on three occasions: their inaugurations, to deliver the annual State of the Union address, and in the case of war. In 1961 Kennedy had already given an inaugural address and, 10 days later, a State of the Union speech.
But April had gone so badly for the Kennedy administration that the president clearly sensed he was losing both the substance of the Cold War with Khrushchev and also the symbolism, and he decided to try to reset the administration’s sense of priorities, and also its momentum, with a fresh message to Congress. He would request a new wave of programs to show his determination to counter the Russians—money to modernize the military, for foreign aid, for an all-new effort at a civil defense program to protect Americans from nuclear attack. And money for a dramatically expanded and dramatically accelerated space program.
But while there was going to be a message, and a fresh set of requests for hundreds of millions of dollars, the plan was to send the written message up to Capitol Hill via courier, where it would be read by clerks to the Senate and House chambers.29
The section of Kennedy’s speech that lays down the challenge for Americans to go to the Moon has become one of the iconic moments of NASA’s history, of the Moon mission itself, and of Kennedy’s time as president. It’s hard to believe his words would have gotten the attention, not to mention providing the momentum and the lasting historical resonance, if he hadn’t actually said them. In fact it’s possible the decision to actually deliver the speech is what gave the Moon mission its first, critical burst of momentum.
Vice President Johnson had delivered a much more thorough analysis of the space issues to Kennedy, written and edited in a furious burst of activity the weekend after Shepard’s flight, and delivered to Kennedy the day Shepard visited the White House. It was 32 pages of history and reasoning, well argued but without much eloquence.
The report was blunt on U.S. space performance to date: “Our results have, despite many excellent achievements, been disappointing in many ways. Nearly half our attempted launchings failed to achieve orbit. Certain programs achieved success, real success, on fewer than a third of all attempts.” On the question of racing the Russians to the Moon, the report argued, “Even if the Soviets get there first, as they may, and as some think they will, it is better for us to get there second than not at all.” And there was a line aimed directly at Kennedy’s inclination for action: “If we fail to accept this challenge it may be interpreted as a lack of national vigor and capacity to respond.” “Vig-ah” was not something Kennedy wanted to be lacking.
But the key moment in the document was this: “We recommend that our National Space Plan include the objective of manned lunar exploration before the end of this decade. . . . The orbiting of machines is not the same as the orbiting or landing of man. It is man, not merely machines, in space that captures the imagination of the world.”30
Kennedy would be considerably more eloquent. He formally agreed to the recommendation at a meeting two days later, on Wednesday, May 10.31
Racing the Russians to the Moon was big news. It was a complete reversal of Kennedy’s, and his administration’s, lack of enthusiasm for space. It would cost what in the 1960s was a huge amount of money. The spending estimates in the Webb-McNamara report were surprisingly accurate: between 1961 and 1963 NASA’s budget would quadruple, and then it would hover at $4 billion a year for five years in a row (the equivalent of $32 billion a year in 2018 dollars).32
The Washington Post broke the news five days before Kennedy announced it, on Saturday, May 20, with the bold front-page headline “U.S. to Race Russians to Moon.” The story, by John G. Norris, opened, “President Kennedy has definitely decided to try to put men on the Moon ahead of Russia under a greatly accelerated space program controlled by civilians.” The story had two interesting qualifications. “Officials decline to describe this as a crash program, because it brings to mind the secret, cost-is-no-object Manhattan atomic bomb project.” And, Norris wrote, “in deciding to try to beat the Russians, officials said there has been no firm determination that this can be done, but rather that it is worth trying.” On Wednesday, the day before the speech, the Post refreshed the story after Kennedy’s weekly meeting with congressional Democrats. “Mr. Kennedy told the group the United States either has to get all the way into the space race or get out, and that his decision is to give it all the Nation has.”
That same day the New York Times also had the news in advance of the speech, but framed it with a Cold War emphasis. “President to Ask an Urgent Effort to Land on Moon” was the headline on the lead story on the front page, which opened, “President Kennedy is expected to tell Congress Thursday that there is an urgent need for the United States to land a man on the Moon—and to do it first, if possible.” Congress, wrote W. H. Lawrence, would be asked for “a vast expansion and speed-up of the entire space program in the context of a race for survival with the Communist world.”33
It wasn’t just a race to the Moon. It was a race for survival.
In Kennedy’s hands, the pitch was not quite as instrumental and was more persuasive. But it was clearly a Cold War challenge.
Why the White House decided not to send the message to Capitol Hill but have Kennedy deliver it in person is a little vague. That Thursday morning—just hours before the speech at 12:30 p.m. from the well of the House of Representatives—the reversal made news. Johnson was credited, in part, with urging Kennedy to make the speech in person. Kennedy, said the Washington Post, needed “a revival of spirit in Washington. Ever since the Cuban invasion fiasco the bloom has been off the bright rose of the early days of the new Administration.”34
Kennedy’s presence and delivery gave the speech an eloquence and an impact it could never have had if read aloud by a clerk. (It was a long speech: 5,800 words as delivered, 46 minutes. Kennedy’s working text, with handwritten edits, was 81 pages.)
It was not, in fact, a speech about space. It was a speech about the Cold War. It was considerably less romantic than his Inaugural.
In just the first five minutes, Kennedy described a worldwide conflict: “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the lands of the rising people. Their revolution is the greatest in human history.”
Kennedy didn’t name the Soviet Union, but he enumerated Russian strategy and techniques: “Their aggression is more often concealed than open. They have fired no missiles. And their troops are seldom seen. They send arms, agitators, aid, technicians and propaganda to every troubled area. But where fighting is required, it is usually done by others. By guerrillas striking at night, by assassins striking alone, assassins who have taken the lives of 4,000 civil officers in the last 12 months in Vietnam alone.” It is, said Kennedy, “a battle for minds and souls as well as lives and territory. And in that contest, we cannot stand aside.”
“There is no single, simple policy which meets this challenge,” said Kennedy, introducing the heart of the speech, a 30-minute list of proposals for increasing U.S. strength around the world. The need to “turn recession into recovery” in the U.S. to provide economic strength. More economic aid for emerging nations. More military aid for emerging nations. A tripling of Voice of America broadcast hours across Latin America, where daily broadcasts from Russia and Red China dramatically exceeded U.S. broadcasts.
Before he got to the subject of space, the very last part of the speech, 30 minutes in, Kennedy had listed 21 specific proposals for countering the Soviets.
“All that I have said makes it clear that we are engaged in a worldwide struggle in which we bear a heavy burden.” Seven minutes later: “This battle is far from over. It is reaching a crucial stage.”
Indeed, the section on the need for a bold expansion of U.S. space ambitions began exactly the same way: “Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.”
Kennedy’s advocacy for space was alternately soaring and specific, cast in terms of rivalry and then explicitly rejecting the rivalry.
“Now it is time to take longer strides, time for a great new American enterprise, time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” Acknowledging the head start of the Soviets, Kennedy said, “We . . . are required to make new efforts on our own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.”
Space “is not merely a race. Space is open to us now, and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go to space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”
That line got full-throated applause from the assembled members of Congress. Of course, in the very passage where Kennedy insisted that space was not merely a race, he promptly reasserted the opposite: he would not leave space to the communists to conquer.
Then he launched into specifics: “First, I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
The House chamber seemed oddly unmoved by this moment, the one that went down in history. There was no applause.
“In a very real sense,” Kennedy continued, “it will not be one man going to the Moon. We make this judgment affirmatively. It will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”
Again, the audience simply waited for Kennedy’s next point.
Kennedy issued a warning and a challenge: “Let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action. A course which will last for many years, and carry very heavy costs. . . .
“If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment, it would be better not to go at all.”
With acute political instincts and an acute sense of the impact of the Moon race on federal spending, Kennedy was imagining the day when Congress wanted to know why the project cost so much, and yet no spacecraft were on the Moon. If you start spending billions to go to the Moon, you have to go, because otherwise you simply waste the billions. There is no “halfway to the Moon,” as there might be 500 miles of interstate highway instead of 1,000. You cannot run out of patience on the way to the Moon.
What’s more, Kennedy was saying, to start and then give up would do much more damage to the sense of resolve and technical skill of the United States than never setting out in the first place.
Kennedy paused to remind everyone in Congress of their own sharp frustration at each Soviet achievement in space. “All of you have lived through the last four years. And have seen the significance of space and the adventures in space. And no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.”
“I believe we should go to the Moon,” he declared. But it will require “a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space unless we are prepared to do the work, and bear the burdens to make it successful.”
This was the point at which the audience applauded; it was the second longest interruption by applause in the whole speech, lasting 13 seconds. The members of Congress who would have to vote for the Moon were ready.
Of the 81 pages of Kennedy’s text, the space section—the last before his conclusion—consumed 10 pages. He ended his rallying cry with a single sentence that is a remarkably prescient description of the culture that the Moon race would require.
America will not succeed, Kennedy said, “unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.”
The Moon will require “the full speed of freedom.” That’s a splendid, original phrase that captures the innovation of capitalism and the determination of democracy, unleashed. It was an echo of what the U.S. had done economically, technologically, and militarily in World War II, which was at that moment only 16 years and two presidents in the past. Kennedy was, perhaps, remembering his own wartime service, for World War II was without question won in part with “the full speed of freedom.” It’s a phrase that fully anticipated exactly the “failure is not an option” culture NASA created: getting to the Moon before the decade was out would indeed require the full speed of freedom.35
Kennedy’s speech didn’t mention what we would learn by going to the Moon. He didn’t mention the science we would have to master to get there, or the technology we would develop to do it, or how that technology would find its way into daily life. He didn’t mention the way the almost unbelievable years-long enterprise would inspire a generation of kids to become engineers and scientists and astronauts.
If you read the whole speech, it’s clear the Moon proposal isn’t about the reach of humankind or the power of curiosity or the irrepressible adventurousness of the human spirit.
Going to the Moon was about beating the Russians and about the impact that beating the Russians would have on “the minds of men [and women] everywhere,” trying to pick between freedom and communism. Even more pointedly, going to the Moon was about the impact that America losing space to the Russians was having on the minds of men and women everywhere. Space was another hemisphere in the geopolitics of the Cold War. Kennedy was not going to let the communist banner fly over Vietnam, and he wasn’t going to let it fly over the Moon, either.
And Kennedy was going to beat the Russians on a deadline. Perhaps the most memorable detail from the space passage is the promise that America would land on the Moon “before this decade is out.” Those five words ended up having incredible power as the sixties progressed. They stuck in the minds of NASA managers and engineers, but also in the minds of senior officials who had no intention of letting the first Moon landing slide into the 1970s. The original text of Kennedy’s speech—written by Sorensen, the space section sent to NASA in advance for review—announced that the Moon landing would take place by 1967. “We were aghast,” said Robert Seamans, who was NASA’s associate administrator and part of the three-person team of senior leaders, with Webb and Dryden. “Jim [Webb] called Ted Sorensen and convinced him and later, the President, that the stated goal should be by the end of the decade. In the final version, President Kennedy changed the deadline to ‘before this decade is out.’ ” The year 1967 had been mentioned at congressional hearings, in Johnson’s weeks of space policy meetings, even at the press conference after the speech, but Webb was well aware how little NASA knew about getting to the Moon, and the whole nation had seen how prone to delay and unexpected problems early spaceflight was. Webb didn’t want a dramatic late-decade success to seem like a failure because it happened in 1969 instead of 1967. Indeed, the general reading inside NASA was that “by the end of the decade,” the phrase NASA suggested, meant 1969 or sooner, but that “before this decade is out” could be interpreted to include 1970, if the extra time were necessary (or even until 1971, a decade from Kennedy’s decision). Given the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 that grounded NASA’s spaceflights for 18 months, Webb’s caution was astute.36
President Kennedy would give a richer, more inspiring, more textured speech about going to the Moon—“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention . . . and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space”—but that speech was 16 months in the future.37
At this moment Kennedy’s call to go to the Moon more than did the trick. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in requests for military spending and foreign aid, the leap to the Moon dominated coverage of the so-called second State of the Union in dramatic eight-column banner headlines: “Kennedy Calls for ‘Crash’ Space Effort” (Baltimore Sun); “U.S. Is Going All-Out to Win Space Race, Land on Moon in ’67” (Washington Post); “Kennedy Asks Billions for Man-to-Moon Shot” (Battle Creek, Michigan, Enquirer and News); “Moon by 1970 Is Goal of JFK” (San Mateo [California] Times); “Shoot for Moon, Kennedy Urges U.S.” (Palm Beach [Florida] Post).
Vice President Johnson, asked to summarize the theme of the speech, replied, “Peace through space.”
The speech was accompanied by detailed budget proposals for increased spending on military helicopters, civil defense shelters, and also spaceships, and the many billions of dollars required to go to the Moon got as much attention as the goal. One anonymous Republican lawmaker said, “Kennedy’s deficit is going to reach the Moon before we do.”38 But Kennedy’s push for actual legislation to make the Moon race a reality was critical. Many U.S. presidents since Kennedy have given dramatic speeches about space policy, with soaring visions, specific ideas, and deadlines.
In 1984 Ronald Reagan charged NASA with creating a spectacular space station, and doing it within 10 years. By the time the International Space Station had its first permanent crew, Reagan’s second term had been over for 11 years. On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, July 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush gave a speech on the steps of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum declaring that the U.S. was going back to the Moon, would establish a permanent Moon base, and then move on to Mars. A year later Bush set a firm goal of a Mars landing by 2020. In 2004 George W. Bush announced a return of U.S. astronauts to the Moon by 2020 for long-term stays and as a staging base for trips to Mars. In 2010, with the ambitious blueprints of his two predecessors unused, Barack Obama told an audience at the Kennedy Space Center that NASA and the U.S. needed a new generation of advanced spacecraft to allow astronauts to land on an asteroid, then to allow people to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s, and land on Mars shortly after. “I expect to be around to see it!” Obama said.39
Presidents have been exhorting NASA and the nation to do the next great thing for 40 years, but not one of them mustered the political will, the congressional support, or the public enthusiasm to make it happen. Kennedy lived in a different world, but he also put enough presidential muscle behind the race to the Moon to keep it going even after he wasn’t there any more to push it.
The brilliant success of Apollo has washed out two important elements of the story almost to invisibility. First, Americans don’t associate the Moon landings with the Cold War or see them as a dramatic victory over the Soviet Union. The Moon landings have enduring, iconic resonance, but in a way different from the Cuban missile crisis or the fall of Saigon or President Reagan’s 1987 speech in Berlin calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
In a way that Kennedy could not anticipate, the mission itself took over. The mission, and the deadline—before the decade was out—motivated and inspired. It’s also true that, at least in the popular imagination, Russian space successes started to fade in drama after Gagarin’s orbital flight, even as U.S. space missions accelerated in drama and frequency and accomplishment, and the ability of Americans to follow them and have a sense of involvement increased. NASA leaders continued to fear that the Russians’ abilities were close to those of the U.S. right through 1968. That, in fact, is why we sent a single space capsule around the Moon at Christmas 1968. With the U.S. so close, but the lunar module not quite ready, NASA wasn’t going to let Russia “lasso the Moon” before the U.S. did.
But for the rest of the world, by Apollo 8 and beyond, the spark of beating the Russians, which lit the fuse on the Moon missions, was replaced with the all-consuming effort that getting to the Moon required. The effort transcended the original purpose.
By the time they happened, the Moon landings had become a singular achievement that didn’t require racing the Russians for their motive force. And so it can be easy for that original spark to fade in significance. But the race to the Moon was born in the Cold War and wouldn’t have happened when it did, with the urgency it did, without it.
The second thing it’s easy to lose track of is how completely unready to fly to the Moon NASA and the nation were on May 25, 1961.
As Kennedy spoke, the United States had 15 minutes and 22 seconds of experience flying an astronaut in a spacecraft. Of that, the actual time in space of Shepard’s spacecraft was 5 minutes and 4 seconds. Shepard spent his entire flight doing tasks, changing the position of switches, checking the status of equipment, operating the capsule’s control jets, and communicating nonstop with Mission Control. He was so busy during his 15 minutes, in fact, that he didn’t notice he was weightless—he didn’t know he was in space—until he saw a washer floating up alongside him in the capsule. The point of all that busyness was to see if the human brain could function normally during weightlessness. With half a century of spaceflight experience, with half a dozen astronauts living and working in space full time now, that question seems almost silly. But it was a genuine medical question and spaceflight concern: How would the brain respond to weightlessness? Would astronauts be able to think?40
Every question about how to fly to the Moon was unanswered, and many of the questions themselves hadn’t even come up yet. What was the surface of the Moon like? How would you land on it? Could two spaceships flying in orbit rendezvous? What kind of math and controls would be required to do that? How do you protect a capsule coming back into Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon—at 25,000 miles per hour—from the incinerating temperatures of reentry?
The senior-most officials at NASA thought there was a 50-50 chance NASA could beat the Russians to the Moon by the end of the sixties. Much of the rest of NASA—which already had 17,600 personnel—was as surprised by Kennedy’s challenge as the rest of the nation. “To those of us who had watched our rockets keel over, spin out of control, or blow up, the idea of putting a man on the Moon seemed almost too breathtakingly ambitious,” said Eugene Kranz, who was developing flight rules for Mercury flights and went on to be a legendary Apollo flight director.
Said Chris Kraft, the flight director for Shepard’s flight, “When [Kennedy] asked us to do that in 1961, it was impossible.”41
In his speech Kennedy explicitly called on Americans (and on Congress) to decide with him to go to the Moon, not once but several times. “I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action—a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs,” he said. Then, a minute later: “I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment . . . because it is a heavy burden.”42
Kennedy was asking not just for a commitment, but for a leap of faith. Put aside spaceflight. In 1961 passenger jets had been in regular service in the U.S. for only a little more than two years. And in 1961 most Americans had never taken an airplane flight of any kind. They’d never been airborne, let alone headed for the Moon.43